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Was this a good idea? 5TB Backup drive

Avatar Michael Corgan
Being a little twitchy about backing up after both my Time Machine and Photograph external hard drives packed up on the same day (or have I mentioned this previously a couple of times?) I also keep a back-up har drive at aa neighbours. Having partitioned my iMac internal drive into two, to run Snow Leopard and El Capitan, I needed a bigger Neighbour Drive to take all my stuff - the two internal HD partitions, and other drives for Photos, Music, MacBook Pro and what have you. The idea was to create a partitioned drive and use SuperDuper to back up each home disk to the relevant partition.

Despair! I can't partition the new drive. I was guided through a download and installation of a program to allow the drive to work with both Mac and Windows files. Having installed the download, Disk Utility in El Capitan shows it formatted as being Mac OSX Journaled. However a message then appears to say that it isn't and has to be journaled from the Disk Utility File menu - an option that is greyed out. I have also noted that the new format is shown as "Apple UDIF read-only compressed (zlib) Media" and any attempt to change this fails.

The Seagate help site isn't helpful. Has anyone relevant experience that will lead me to Nirvana? (well, partitioning the new hard drive)?

Re: Was this a good idea? 5TB Backup drive

Avatar Mick Burrell
You don't need the software you downloaded - format the drive to FAT 32 using Disc Utility. That's a Windows format but a Mac will cope with it. I think (but haven't tested) that you can have different formats on different partitions so you could just use FAT 32 on the partition(s) that you need to access using Windows and Mac formats for the others.

One minor limitation of FAT 32 is that it can't handle files larger than 4MB but that's rarely an issue.

Re: Was this a good idea? 5TB Backup drive

Avatar Euan Williams
Mike, you don't say whether this is just a single humongous SATA drive in a box, Network-attached storage, or a multiple drive RAID array of one flavour or another. - I'm assuming one big SATA drive in a box.

People can get rather confused about this issue, so here is one article about it..

Macs can read and write to the Windows formats, but Windows requires a special utility to do the reverse.

However (big pause) you can't write anything other than basic data files from a Mac to a PC format drive unless you wrap it up in a Disk Image (.dmg) using Disk Utility. This precludes any Application, Clone, Time Machine set up etc. while Videos, Word files, Images would be fine.

Whatever vendors "promise", I haven't heard of any successful dual-format being successful -- mostly (as in the OSX Daily article above) they are talking about access rather than native compatibility, and yes, I did once ask a major drive vendor's senior techie about this although things change over time.

Generally, the formatting utilities included with drives aren't much use (even WD included one which was renowned for screwing things up) and usually have more to do with some "special ability to..." Just use Disk Utility, and all the other stuff is easily done within macOS' native abilities

My main concern is that you are putting all your eggs in one basket. 5TB sounds impressive, but it's a lot to lose in one moment of carelessness or drive catastrophe. There is safety in numbers and spreading your data over several smaller drives.

What to do now: attach your 5TB drive to your Mac, open Disk Utility and reformat it for "Mac OS Extended (journaled)" with "Partition Scheme: GUID". Now partition it into reasonable sized partitions (e.g. 250GB for speed, flexibility, safety and convenience.

If your neighbour needs to access it for Windows (unlikely) use the appropriate Windows access utility.

Re: Was this a good idea? 5TB Backup drive

Avatar Mick Burrell
Euan - I'm fairly sure I have come across people who have bought an external drive (formatted FAT 32) and, not knowing how to format it or even that it could be formatted differently or what formatting is, just plugged it in and Time Machine uses it quite happily. (If on hand at the start however, I do recommend formatting to Mac OS X Extended Journaled, but not if I arrive a year down the line.)

Re: Was this a good idea? 5TB Backup drive

Avatar Euan Williams
Hi Mick, it seems that, when users try to make a FAT Drive (or Partition) into their Time Machine target, the Mac OS reformats it automatically to MacOS Extended (journaled). This info is gathered from on-line discussions I have looked at between 2008 and 2014, but not from personal experience. I doubt that this has changed recently -- there would probably have been some sort of a fanfare from dual-users had it done so.

Michael C. doesn't mention a need to store Time Machine backup files, so presumably there is no need for him to transfer these files prior to reformatting. If he does need to do so, there is a procedure outlined by Apple here.

Hope this helps someone (somewhat).

Re: Was this a good idea? 5TB Backup drive

Avatar Mick Burrell
I'm going to have to check a few drives as, if pushed, I would have said that I discovered this (that TM works on FAT 32) from checking the current format of an in-use TM volume - but I'm getting older and my memory is not what it was and it was never good to start with ;-)

It seems quite possible and very Apple that it would "just work" by formatting it for you but I wondered if it would warn you of formatting if the drive wasn't empty. So I formatted a drive to MS-DOS (FAT) (it's not called FAT 32 any more it seems!) and pointed TM at it. It did indeed warn me it was about to erase it and on checking it had indeed formatted to Mac Extended Case Sensitive, Journaled. My memory fails again!

Re: Was this a good idea? 5TB Backup drive

Avatar Euan Williams
Thanks, Mick: experimental evidence is always best!

Re: Was this a good idea? 5TB Backup drive

Avatar Tony Still
I believe that TM relies upon some special features that Apple added to HFS+ to support it (Hard Links, for the curious). Therefore, I would be extremely surprised if it worked on FAT formatted disks. Mick may be thinking of some NAS solutions where the TM protocol is supported and written to the managed drive: that could be in any format as long as the associated software emulates hard links..

Apple (here) lists the supported formats which does not include FAT. The emphasis of the article is on directly connected drives though.

I assumed that Michael's neighbour was simply storing the drives. I think a TM back-up would present a significant problem to a Windows machine even if it could mount the volume so I would personally discount that as a reason to move away from MacOS Extended (Journaled).

I would also support Euan's view of drive vendors' software: if Disk Utility will format it then I'd stick with that. Disk formats are complex things and you don't want lurking errors in them. I bought a couple of LaCie external drives several years ago and their software installed no less than four kexts (kernel extensions - another sensitive and error-prone area); that's not a recipe for system reliability. The software stayed on my machine just long enough to change a proprietary drive setting.

Re: Was this a good idea? 5TB Backup drive

Avatar Mick Burrell
Thanks for trying to dig me out of a hole Tony but I regret to say it was purely down to failing memory! I've obviously never seen a working TM on a FAT 32 drive. I'm going to lie down in a darkened room for a few hours to see if that helps.

Re: Was this a good idea? 5TB Backup drive

Avatar Michael Corgan
Thanks to The Three Wise Men of the West.... Seagate responded very promptly to an email to their Support Team (discovered lurking on another page on their web-site. Simple answer - Erase the drive and reformat - I hadn't wanted to do that as there were some advisory files on it which I was unable to copy to a temporary home. Anyway all is now re-formatted and partitioned (six partitions OK, Euan?) and files are being copied across as I write. And Tony, you were right, my neighbour merely provides an off-site home for this monster back-up and would not be accessing it, even if he could!
 
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